Canadian teen charged with Albany-area school threats and menacing calls to airports, hotels, suicide hotline

By Kathleen Moore | Times Union, Albany
Bethlehem, N.Y. — A 14-year-old boy in Halifax, Nova Scotia has been charged under Canadian law with offenses tied to 11 calls threatening violence at Bethlehem High School as well as airports, hotels and a suicide hotline in a campaign the FBI describes as a “reign of chaos.”
The teen was using IP and telephone spoofing technology to hide his identity, authorities said. The IP address first erroneously led FBI investigators to a home in Texas.
After learning the IP address had been compromised, the investigation turned to Canada.
FBI Special Agent in Charge Craig Tremaroli said the teen was responsible for a number of other hoax phone calls.
“The reign of chaos comes to an end,” he said Monday at a news conference at the FBI office in Albany.
The teen is in custody in Canada. He was arrested Friday on four charges, covering all of the hoax calls, and sent to a juvenile facility, Tremaroli said.
After the threatening calls targeting Bethlehem High began Sept. 10, the FBI tracked them to 12 states. They conducted “countless interviews” including ones with a startled family in Dallas, Texas, whose IP address had been used by the boy, he said.
“We are talking about several layers of obfuscation,” Tremaroli said, citing the ways the boy kept his location secret.
The teen was assisted by others online through social media and gaming platforms, in “communities of interest” in which people shared information about hoax calls and taught each other how to make them without getting caught, he said.
Law enforcement seized numerous electronics when the teen was arrested Friday. The data on those devices may lead to more arrests, Tremaroli said.
The boy was arrested on four Canadian charges: public mischief, uttering threats, fraudulent use of a computer and indecent communication of mischief. The evidence the FBI gathered enhanced those charges, but it’s unclear whether Canadian law enforcement was already in the process of arresting him when they were contacted by the FBI. The FBI spokeswoman declined to comment, citing the ongoing investigation.
The Ottawa Citizen reported on the arrest Friday, and said that the investigation was continuing with police in multiple jurisdictions, including the FBI. The boy is accused of making hoax calls that led to some Ontario schools closing, in one case for multiple days.
Tremaroli said he did not know what the consequences were for juveniles arrested with these charges in Canada.
However, Bethlehem police Chief Gina Cocchiara said residents should feel assured that Canada will “deal with this juvenile.
“This behavior is taken very seriously. Threatening others is unacceptable,” she said.
More than 200 high school students were terrified Sept. 11 after a second hoax call led police and school officials to put the school on lockdown. The incident created a chaotic scene at the school with officials trying to determine if there was a threat of a mass shooting and students scrambling in fear. The caller said he was a Bethlehem resident, the police chief said.
Town police received six phone threats that alleged to target violence generally to the schools, Bethlehem High School and the football team, between Sept. 10 and Sept. 12. The calls started again in October, with five more calls that the boy is accused of making, plus one bomb threat for which an Albany boy has been arrested. But by then, police had determined the calls were hoaxes and the school did not have more lockdowns.
For weeks, local police and the FBI promised to determine who was responsible for the calls.
On Sept. 16, the FBI announced that it had tracked the calls outside of the Capital Region and that there was no evidence of a connection between the caller and the school district. The FBI labeled the calls a swatting incident. Swatting is when someone reports a fake crime to get an aggressive law enforcement response. The person often follows the chaos by watching news, social media and announcements from the target.
Attendance plummeted at the high school in the wake of the initial threats, and police openly patrolled the school to help students feel safe.
In the Sept. 11 incident, students and parents described an officer running across the field hockey field, a long gun strapped to his chest, shouting about an active shooter and telling them to run.
Body camera footage showed that the order from a fellow officer was not as urgent.
“Guys, clear the field right now,” an officer commanded staff at the start of the evacuation. “Bring them into the school if you have to. Give them an escort.”
Students said they fled in fear and spent more than an hour thinking that someone had started shooting at the school. They had been ordered to leave their belongings behind. Only a few had cellphones with them and information was scarce. Still, some students frantically texted their parents to leave the area, writing that they didn’t want their parents to be shot. Parents desperately texted children to find out if they were hurt.
A lockdown is different from the more common lockout, in which no one is allowed into the school because of a possible criminal outside. In a lockdown, students are taught to lock themselves into a room and hide from a potential shooter.
The caller issued a specific threat against the football team at a specific time that afternoon. In response, police evacuated all of the school fields, where multiple games and practices were going on. For more than an hour, students hid in a maintenance garage, the school gym and other locations.
Body camera footage, initially censored, showed that police realized the call was a hoax long before they notified the students. Several officers brought up concerns about the fact that many students were squeezing themselves under the bleachers, the only place to hide in the gym. But officers were not sent to reassure them. Instead, school and law enforcement officials focused on the complex logistics of getting each away team onto the correct buses to leave the school. Many teams from other schools were at the high school for competitions that day.
Patrick Tine contributed
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